


Heat Lightning

by Dedicate Kiwicrocus (cranky__crocus)



Series: SMACKDOWN '11 R2, R3, Final - CIRCLECEST [18]
Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/F, Goldenlake, smackdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-06
Updated: 2011-06-06
Packaged: 2017-10-20 04:48:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cranky__crocus/pseuds/Dedicate%20Kiwicrocus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...how could water and fire ever coexist in such a way?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for SMACKDOWN at Goldenlake: fiefgoldenlake.proboards.com
> 
> Prior to this series, I had never written Circeclest shippy material. I blame PeroxidePirate.

Tris is not given to flights of fancy; after her rootless drifting over a sea of pirates, she is not given to flights at all. She envies Sandry her daydreams and, in a way, Briar his firm attachment to earth. She finds she is somewhere betwixt the two and none the more comfortable for her middle ground.

            But sometimes, when she gazes at Daja, she finds a hint of the chimerical and impossible—she thought—traits that poets attribute to the ladies of epic poems. But Tris knows that those ladies of poetry pale next to Daja, for they are fickle and flittering, to Tris’ mind.

            Daja is the embodiment of strength and yet she bends, for she is also molten heat; she has the ingenuity and resourcefulness that the fair damsels of old lacked.

            Tris is drawn to Daja, but fears that she is the rain and ocean to Daja’s flame: how could water and fire ever coexist in such a way?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tris heard them once, on the wind.

Tris has been steam before, when the heat of her life pushed her to it. Discipline had cooled her, sometimes to the placidity of truly serene waters—not the hint of a storm or its ripples and tsunamis present. But that Tris was going up in steam with the molten heat of Daja below her waters. Not that Daja knew or _could_ know.

            The result of Tris’ transformation was a return to her old habits, primarily that of impugning others. It did not go unnoticed by Briar or Daja, who both lived under the same roof as she, but also by Sandry who was a frequent visitor.

            Tris heard them once, on the wind.

            “She’s competing with Rosethorn on the prickles front.” Briar.

            “I can’t go an hour without some sort of snipe.” Sandry, and movement. “But she’s worst on you, isn’t she, Daja?”

            The sound of soft metal on wood—Daja’s hand on her staff, Tris thought, erasing the image of Daja’s hand… And her voice. “She has.” A pause. “You know when our work acts out because it wishes to be something else, be treated differently?”

            Synchronised movement—surely nodding. Tris adjusted her sight and plucked images from the breeze she was cycling through the Cheeseman house.

            It was just in time to see Daja turn directly into the moving air, all broad cheekbones and strong features. “It feels like that.”

            “So what do we do…?” Sandry again, but Tris removed herself from the breeze. She had been caught.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re trying to pull away.”

Daja approached Tris in the room that would have been Sandry’s bedroom—and sometimes was—but that existed primarily as a library.

            “Tris,” Daja said, announcing her presence as well as greeting her friend.

            Tris damned the frisson Daja’s voice released in her body, commanded her skin back to smoothness in lieu of goosespots. She returned, “Daja.”

            The girl—woman, now—stood in the doorway, though her posture indicated she harboured thoughts of entering. “Sandry is at the citadel for important week-long business; Briar is headed to an Earth Temple in Irod.”

            “I know.” Tris sniffed and turned the page in her book. Why was Daja telling her this?

            “So we’re alone.” Daja entered the room and sat in the chair next to Tris’.

            Tris had always been tethered to Daja—part of the Circle, after all, and there had been much ‘all’ to be after—but she could feel it strongest in moments like these. She attempted to tug herself free.

            “I can feel that, you know,” Daja murmured, staring out at the wall of books across the room. She was keeping the pressure off Tris. “You’re trying to pull away.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Why are you trying to pull away, Tris?”

“ _Why_ are you trying to pull away, Tris?” Daja asked after a moment of silence. “Are you not happy here? Sandry, Briar and I would be saddened to see you stay at Lightsbridge, but if that was what you wanted we would understand.”

            “No!” Tris snapped; the sound competed with the clap of her book’s two covers coming together forcefully. “I _don’t_ want to stay at Lightsbridge, not in any sort of permanent state—and dry up? No.”

            Daja sighed and gripped her staff. “What _do_ you want, then? You haven’t been this difficult since—”

            “Difficult?” Tris scoffed. “You know what’s difficult? Seeing _you_ parade girls around this house, all prim and proper and _pampered_. It was bad enough to see Briar’s endless stream of girls, or Sandry’s bumbling charmer-courtiers, but you, too? I’m living in a bad romance.”

            Daja’s eyebrow rose, slow and—damn all— _sensual_. “Wouldn’t that require some romance on your part?”

            “Yes, let’s just rub in the sore spot, shall we? Tubby Tris can’t find a man. Not as though we haven’t heard it a thousand times, what’s a few thousand times more? And not as though fame has helped.”

            “Tris, I didn’t mean—” Daja’s eyes were wide, as close to panicked as the woman ever got. Nothing could throw her as much as tense relationship with the only real family she’d had since her own had died a brutal sea death. She took a deep breath to calm herself and summoned some of the quiet strength from the metal scattered about the room—even in the spine of Tris’ well-crafted book. “Tris, you could have your pick. What I mean to say is…you’re _beautiful_.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m…beautiful?” Tris repeated, her voice the whisper of old pages being turned. “No.”

“I’m…beautiful?” Tris repeated, her voice the whisper of old pages being turned. “No.”

            “Yes,” Daja confirmed, taking Tris’ hand from her closed book. “Yes, you are. Any of us would go hoarse telling you to hell and back as you beat us. Sandry thinks you’re gorgeous; Briar thinks you’re better than any of the girls he’s met. We don’t think it out of necessity, because you’re one of us, either. It’s stating truth—as we tend to.”

            “But I’m, I’m—” Tris gestured down the length of her body. “I’m _this_. That’s not beauty.”

            “Who’s to say?” Daja challenged, her eyes flashing with something that made Tris’ insides flutter and fall. “And beauty isn’t just that, it’s collective—collective of everything about a person. You, with all your fierce protectiveness and witty cleverness, are beautiful. Through and through.”

            Tris grew redder with every word. She snatched her hand away and cradled it, hidden under her book again. Daja stood and, with grace contesting Lark’s, flew over the space between their chairs and landed in Tris’, where she lowered herself and held all of Tris tight.

            “Beautiful,” Daja murmured, repeating it a number of times more. Tris resisted at first, but at last allowed her head to fall near Daja’s.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Do you mind if I…?”

Tris’ braids rested against Daja’s as they relaxed together within the same armchair of the Cheeseman House library (and Sandry’s occasional bedroom).

            Daja’s breathing was so slow and quiet that Tris thought she had fallen asleep. She lifted her hands to the woman’s braids; she could never quite get over how different their hair felt, even within similar styles. Daja and Sandry had once taught Tris to braid her hair in such a pattern, as Briar had watched on with a grin and frequent laughter.

            Daja captured her wrist with cat-like reflexes, drawing Tris’ hand down to her chest and tracing circle’s on the woman’s palm. Tris felt the shiver run rampant across her skin and somewhere deeper, down where she had seldom felt stirred before.

            “Do you mind if I…?” Daja whispered, her face growing closer with every syllable. Tris felt her breath catch in her lungs, until Daja rested a hand there. “If you promise to breathe.”

            “If I remember how,” Tris answered honestly. Daja laughed, soft and subtle, and then her lips were on Tris’.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daja’s lips against hers was like nothing she could have described even at a push, Tris thought.

Daja’s lips against hers was like nothing she could have described even at a push, Tris thought. The heat of it… And Daja’s living-metal palm pressed to her cheek, as if the metal itself was stroking her and sharing in the passion. The air in the room fluttered; Sandry’s curtains and the leaves of Briar’s plants flapped with the movement.

This moment was more than Tris’ mind could conceive. The susurrus of wind—and the quiet moments there—before the rustled excitement, the storm and its peals of thunder, flashes of lightning.

            And then there was Daja. It was not to say that she could not be stirred, but that it was deep and hidden, down at the depths of volcanic movement that not an eye could spot until the eventual eruption.

            Daja lifted Tris from the chair—no strain, no self-consciousness—lips still locked and moving. Tris felt the stairs through Daja’s legs and the change of altitude within the house. She could feel the softness of Sandry-woven sheets over Daja’s bed, the feel of Briar’s touch in the windowsill living-metal _shakkan_.

            Tris marvelled at how her feelings for Daja had not grown _more_ , but different. With Daja’s lips against her neck, she thought she never wanted her feelings to revert again.

            “Are you alright with this?” Daja inquired, her concern evident even with the lowered pitch of her voice. Her fingers gently grasped Tris’ knee.

            “I am more than alright with this.” And Tris leaned to kiss Daja back.

            It was not a case of water and fire, heat and steam, then—at least not to its core. Tris wouldn’t put Daja out by the mere force of her existence and character. And Daja, like too few in these lands, was not frightened of her storms.

            (Instead, she laughed at the cyclone that tickled down her spine and told Tris to put her twister away, just as Tris’ fingers twisted in the sheets.)

            Common people tended to think that lightning during hot summer days was merely a play of the atmosphere, not an indication of storms at all. But the truth of heat lightning was that a storm _was_ happening—somewhere else.

            Sandry smiled into her taxes; Briar grinned at a tavern woman, but for once not _to_ the woman.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! C: Hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
